brilliant but kind of sloppy
Customer Rating: 
To the author's credit, the book overall is provocative, very interesting, and somewhat compelling. Raymond makes arguments throughout about the benefits of open source over closed for the software industry. What's impressive about these arguments is how many of them are made independent of any open source ideology; instead he draws from political theory, economics, and game theory to illustrate how open source is actually in many cases the rational choice for a self-interested entity, and consequently inevitable (in his opinion). Raymond also paints a colorful picture of hacker culture that conveys the group's fascinating dynamic, while enough of his own character and achievements are revealed to suggest why he's so qualified to be speaking: his title essay is widely credited as a primary inspiration for the transformation of Netscape Navigator into Mozilla Firefox; he helped charter the Mozilla Public License; in "Revenge of the Hackers", he admits (without much modesty) that "by late 1993, many people (including myself) had come to think of me as the hacker culture's tribal historian and resident ethnographer"; etc.
But the book has weaknesses as well. Raymond frequently comes off as abrasively egotistical, and it's disconcerting how many typos you can find. Moreover, his system of endnotes is misnumbered in some places and completely confounding in others; I still don't understand it fully, though I've made corrections to some of the numbering mistakes and will be happy to pass them on. In addition, all of the examples he cites are dated by at least eight years, even in this revised text (though that's not to say they aren't still instructive). He keeps the most updated version of the text on his website at [...], where many of these criticisms may be addressed; I haven't checked.
A Collection of Essays on Open Source
Customer Rating: The Cathedral and the Bazaar is a collection of essays originally meant for programmers and technical managers, written by Eric S. Raymond on software engineering methods, based on his observations of the Linux kernel development process and his experiences managing an open source project, fetchmail.
I you like a deeper work on Linux development, I can recommend the book "Rebel Code" by Glyn Moody.
fetchmail, is an open-source software utility to retrieve e-mail from a remote mail server. It was developed by Eric S. Raymond from the popclient program, written by Carl Harris. Its chief significance is perhaps that its author, Eric S. Raymond, used it as a model to discuss his theories of open source software development in this book. Some programmers, including Dan Bernstein, getmail creator Charles Cazabon and FreeBSD developer Terry Lambert, have criticized fetchmail's design], its number of security holes, and that it was prematurely put into "maintenance mode". In 2004, a new team of maintainers took over fetchmail development, and laid out development plans that in some cases broke with design decisions that Eric Raymond had made in earlier versions.
The essays in the book describe open-source software, the process of systematically harnessing open develplment and decentralized peer review to lower costs and improve software quality. contrasts two different free software development models:
- The Cathedral model, in which source code is available with each software release, but code developed between releases is restricted to an exclusive group of software developers. GNU Emacs and GCC are presented as examples.
- The Bazaar model, in which the code is developed over the Internet in view of the public. Raymond credits Linus Torvalds, leader of the Linux kernel project, as the inventor of this process. Raymond also provides anecdotal accounts of his own implementation of this model for the fetchmail project.
The essay's central thesis is Raymond's proposition that "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow" (which he terms Linus' law): the more widely available the source code is for public testing, scrutiny, and experimentation, the more rapidly all forms of bugs will be discovered. In contrast, Raymond claims that an inordinate amount of time and energy must be spent hunting for bugs in the Cathedral model, since the working version of the code is available only to a few developers.
When O'Reilly Media published the book in 1999, it achieved another distinction by being the first complete and commercially distributed book published under the Open Publication License.
